While we can’t control when we feel anger or fear—or how strongly—we can gain some control over what we do while in its grip. If we can develop inner radar for emotional danger, we gain a choice point.

To find this inner choice point, start by questioning destructive mental habits. Even though there may be a bit of legitimacy to our grievances, are the disturbing emotions we feel way out of proportion? Are such feelings familiar? Are you ruminating? If so, we would do well to gain more control over those self-defeating habits of mind.

This approach takes advantage of an effect studied by Kevin Ochsner, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. Volunteers’ brains were scanned as they saw photos of people’s faces showing emotions ranging from a woman in tears to a baby laughing. Their emotional centers immediately activated the circuitry for whichever feeling those faces expressed.

But then Ochsner asked the volunteers to rethink what might be going on in the more disturbing photos in a less alarming way: Perhaps that woman was crying at a wedding, not a funeral. With that rethink, there was a striking shift in the brain: The emotional centers lost energy, as circuits higher in the prefrontal cortex—those for pondering—activated.

As the Columbia research showed, this strategy seems to arouse circuitry in the prefrontal areas that can resist more-primal limbic signals for strong negative emotions. That circuitry appears to be at play in a wide variety of methods, including reasoning with yourself about negative impulses and feelings.

Not everyone takes to reasoning to handle rocky feelings. Bad habits are usually all too quick to step in to lend a not-so-helpful hand. But there is a vast range of approaches we might try—ranging from mindfulness to various psychotherapies. Whatever method we find is fine, so long as it helps us lessen the power of our destructive emotions.

Self-Awareness: The First Step in Emotional Hygiene

One method that can be particularly helpful: noticing the emotional stirrings that signal destructive emotions, then thinking about what those stirrings might indicate—particularly fresh perspectives on our feelings rather than the same old rote thoughts that usually go with them.

This approach combines an awareness of our feelings with reasoning about their causes—a method popularized in the West by “mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.”

When handling our turbulent feelings, it helps to understand what happens in the buildup to them. This typically goes by unnoticed. But if we can bring the buildup into our awareness, we gain a mental foothold that allows us to short-circuit what otherwise would become a destructive emotional hijack.

For this it helps to become aware of the gap between the provocation of an emotion, like anger, and our response. The same goes for our more mundane tensions, the ones we all face when whim and impulse contend with obligation and responsibility. A pause can help us sort out when those impulses and whims are just fine to act on and when obligation and responsibility matter more.

“Some people,” Paul Ekman notes, “have a large gap, some small.” Widening that gap makes us better able to manage our destructive emotions, as well as to make better life choices.

“This is not easy,” he adds, “because emotions evolved to make us respond immediately, without conscious thought.”

It can help to tune in to the ways our destructive emotions feel as they build in the body: When we’re getting annoyed, for instance, do we clench our jaw? Do we have certain familiar thoughts? Whatever the signals might be, we can use them in a kind of mental radar.

As we get more familiarity with bringing our attention to the chain that leads to emotional hijacks, we should gradually get better at catching ourselves. And quite often the simple act of noting them and naming them lets them subside.

If our mindfulness has become very strong, the emotion gets nipped in the bud the moment we become aware of what’s stirring—we halt the impulse even before it takes hold. One test of this progression comes when you confront someone who is hostile but remain calm yourself, able to use your discernment to understand why they might feel that way—rather than launching an angry rebuttal.